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at around 2 AM, as usual. its summer! i have all the time in the world to do whatever i want! well, for 2 and a half months, at least. wait, NO! i don't! because i have a summer job. don't really know if that's a good thing or not. i mean, lets see the pros and cons of it. it's fairly easy.
Pros: i don't waste my summer doing literally nothing at home all day. i get paid $10/ hour, i work in San Francisco, my job is to use facebook, linkedin, and twitter, i like pie.
cons: taxes. no sleeping in. no time to chill with friends other than after work and weekends. 2 hours of commute a day. i have to write a report on the interactions i get on said social media sites. I dont get free pie.

but, money is good. it helps me fund the various expenses i have this summer. for instance, i just spent $200 on the deposit for the studio my band, Seventh Day Breakdown. we'll be recording in all of 2 weeks. scary as hell, yet also exhilarating as hell. its really soon, considering that we only came together as a band about 3 months ago, but we never even bothered covering famous songs; we went straight into writing our own stuff after a failed attempt at The White Stripes' Seven Nation Army. (We flopped about half way through the song, when all of us forgot the rest. at exactly the same time.). but a level of urgency to get it done came up. of course we'd have loved to do it near the end of summer, but unfortunately, one of our guitarists, who moved here for the semester from Indiana, is returning back to his home. we'll definitely going to miss him. so, we'll be in the studio for two days to lay down our first EP! email me if you want a copy!

i also have been attempting to further my progress in the photographic arts, especially in portraiture. i have been wanting something new to play with to offer me a new challenge; a new toy to master and fully understand. it seems like i understand my beloved nifty fifty rather well, though i know i'll always be unraveling it's mysteries. of course i know i'm no master with my flash; there's a whole other world with it, but i want to delve even deeper than i am now. but i'm carving myself deeper than the mines of Moria right now. Strobism is an art in itself, as much as its a part of photography. it's pretty much the art of light within photography, but there's so much more to it than just a light source blasting at a person or object. it poses a challenge to me that i dont think i'll ever fully defeat, and its a skill i'll never actually master. but i want to embark on the journey on how strobism will affect my photography by investing is a set of (moderately)cheap studio style monolight strobes.

of course, when i say (moderately) cheap monolights, they're not exactly within the normal budget. hey, photography ain't cheap! the set up of two monolights, stands, bags, and two different umbrella modifiers while cost be near $800 shipped. yeah, not very nice on the wallet. of course my dad and brother think its stupid, and they think its not really something that i'll use very often. no matter how effective and well thought out my arguements are they never seem to understand why i want to invest in strobes. of course it's a metric shitton of money, but everything photography related costs a lot of money. my dad and my brother both thing it'd be a better investment to spend my lens fund and a little more from my summer earnings on a versatile lens, but then there, they also dont realize something. there's absolutely no point. all the good non-L series lenses (the top of the line lenses) are primes, with fixed focal lengths and consistent aperture; the style of lenses i actually do like, though they both think they're useless. either they're primes, or they're zoom/telephoto lenses that are priced so high, you may as well buy a L series lens for a few hundred more. there pretty much is no middle ground offered by canon, and i dont want to go third party.

so where does this all leave me? sitting here with my Canon T1i, my beloved little nifty fifty, and my flash. right where i am. of course, soem other elements as to why i want more gear comes into play. i have friends who get all sorts of cool, expensive gear, and being a somewhat normal teenager, i'm slightly enviousof the amount and qaulity of the gear they either own or have access to. i feel rather limited to what i have, and i know its not the gear that makes the photograph, but the photographer. i just think that some level of gear comes into play. there's bound to be some photographer around somewhere who can take a bloody good photograph with my rig, but there's countless others who take better photographs with more extensive rigs. the more gear just opens more doorways an possibilities to go in different directions with your art. ad lighting is such a broad topic, i'm sure i'll be fascinated with it for years to come, which is why i think its the smart investment. not to mention, once i get the hang of it, i can begin to do shoots!

anyways, its now 2:42 AM, my pop's is getting pissed, and my visions blurring. i have a crazy, fun packed summer ahead of me, and an even crazier, stressful school year to oh so joyously look forward to at the end of these coming two and half months. hopefully you'll see more posts within the time frame, but dont be too optimistic!